


I'll put my armor on, show you how strong I am

by queenofchildren



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, Friends to Lovers, Ice Mechanic, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-29
Updated: 2016-03-29
Packaged: 2018-05-29 20:53:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6393397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenofchildren/pseuds/queenofchildren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Raven thinks Roan makes a halfway decent mechanic, and Roan thinks Raven deserves better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'll put my armor on, show you how strong I am

Raven helps pave the way for the complete destruction of mankind (for real this time) and then becomes a hero when she turns around and stops ALIE’s crazy plan before it can come to fruition. And what does she get for it? Pain, always pain, and this time it’s worse than before, or so it feels. It’s an illusion, Abby tells her: her condition may not get better but it also shouldn’t get worse, as long as she rests. And Raven knows that, but now she also remembers what it feels like not to be in pain all the time, and the memory is difficult to repress.

So Raven does what she always does: She works. At least this time Abby doesn’t make her sort scrap metal again but puts her in charge of reworking the parts they took out of ALIE’s mansion. Making useful gadgets out of bombs is surprisingly satisfying, especially since their coalition with the Ice Nation (and a bunch of other clans Raven didn’t bother to remember) specifically states that none of the materials may be used for anything pertaining to weapons, defense, or surveillance. But there’s lots of other stuff that needs doing, and Raven frantically starts ten projects at once, everything from automated, energy-saving lighting to more efficient solar panels to a functioning entertaiment system.

Raven not only shuts herself into her lab, but she moves a cot and her handful of belongings in there too so she effectively lives at her workbench, not that anyone really notices. She doesn’t see many people these days, for varying reasons – some are just too busy, some have not forgiven her for her role in Jaha and ALIEs insane plot, some just don’t care enough, she guesses.

It’s not like she ever had a lot of people – her mother was never around, and Finn left her quite a while before he died. She definitely has more people to occasionally come check in on her here. She’s just not sure how high up on their list of priorities she is.

Abby kind of drifts in and out of her life when it’s convenient, or when she has a minute of free time to remember that she used to call Raven her friend.

There’s Sinclair of course, but Sinclair is a mentor more than a friend, and he’s practially in charge of running Arkadia these days, so he’s a busy man and Raven doesn’t want to burden him with her neverending cycle of pain and self-loathing.

She used to have Bellamy, as much as anyone not called Clarke or Octavia can ”have“ Bellamy, but that changed after Gina’s death. (She’d think he was blaming her for surviving the attack that took Gina’s life, but she knows that’s not the case – Bellamy only ever blames _himself_ when something bad happens to the people he loves.) And now… well, now Bellamy is in no position to make anyone feel better about anything.

Neither is Monty, but he still comes by and tries, tinkering alongside her in comfortable silence. She prefers it that way, and she assumes Monty does too. But after a few hours, Monty is invariably picked up by Miller and practically escorted to the dining hall, which is adorable but only serves to make her feel more lonely.

Unlike Bellamy and Monty, Clarke is all talk when she stops by, clearly trying to rebuild the bridges she burned when she left, and Raven lets her because Clarke’s grateful smile whenever she indulges her in a few minutes of friendly conversation is enough to chip away even at her hardened heart. But of course, Clarke is never just her friend, she’s also always… whatever the hell she is for Arkadia these days. So of course she inevitably _needs_ something from her.

As always with Clarke, it’s urgent and important and could decide the fate of their people, and honestly, at this point Raven just nods and tells her she’ll go along with whatever it is she’s planning. Granted, she may have been distracted with her work on a positively delightful and mostly intact motherboard, but still, in hindsight, Raven thinks she should have noticed the grounder dude with the ornamental facial scars standing behind Clarke.

And when she does because he moves from his place by the door into the room (her room!), she’s so distracted she almost misses what might be Clarke’s second explanation of what’s going on here.

“…so Roan will be staying here to help you and learn from you as well. Part of our peace treaty with the Ice Nation includes us giving them some of the tech we’ve created from the ruins of ALIEs mansion, so Roan will tell you what kinds of things his people can use and you’ll help him build them.” Then she remembers that it’s not actually war anymore so there’s no need to make _everything_ a command, and adds: “That wouldn’t be too much of an inconvenience, would it?”

It probably will be, Raven thinks with another look at the grounder. He is definitely big, so space might be an issue, and his hands are probably trained with swords and knives, not screwdrivers and soldering rods and impossibly delicate materials, and it’s not like the grounders are famous for their use of technology. But Clarke has that determined look on her face that promises things will happen exactly the way she wants them to, and Raven doesn’t have the energy to put up with that today.

“He can stay if he’s quiet and doesn’t touch anything without my permission.”

She doesn’t look at the grounder as she says it, aware that she’s being rude but determined not to care.

“Thank you, Raven. You’re doing us all a huge favour.” Raven rolls her eyes at the statement, but Clarke smiles and briefly squeezes her arm and she hasn’t really been touched like that in a while, so she’s defenseless against the affirmative gesture and smiles right back.

Then Clarke is gone and she’s left alone in the room with a grounder who looks more than a little dangerous. She doesn’t know what the grounder equivalent to mechanics and engineers is, but she’s pretty sure this guy is not one. He has the kind of muscles that don’t come from sitting bent over a workbench all day, and if the rumours she’s heard about the Ice Nation’s facial scars indicating success in battle are true, this man is a deadly warrior, not a lowly worker. So what the hell is he doing here?

Maybe he’s injured too, Raven thinks as she lets her eyes slide up and down his body measuringly, and she’s not sure if she likes the idea of not being quite so alone in her brokenness, or hates that they’re making her babysit him. But by the time her eyes have taken in all of him and reached his eyes again, she’s pretty sure he’s not injured in the least – he’s all lean, muscled strength, but his stance is relaxed and there’s no sight of the kind of lopsided posture she’s starting to develop from being in pain all the time.

And then there are his eyes. An opaque, glittering blue, they seem to be constantly narrowed in an almost wolfish manner, as if he was still deciding if she’s enemy or prey, and Raven would never admit it but she finds them unnerving.

Trying to appear unfazed, she turns away from him towards the workbench.

“I take it you know English? Because I don’t speak grounder, so that would make things difficult.”

“I know English,” he replies, and his deep, gravelly voice sends an almost physical shock through her.

Then he steps up to the workbench behind her, just a little too close for comfort, and looks over her shoulder at her hands playing nervously with a few scrap pieces.

“Maybe you should start by explaining the basics to me.”

Raven’s not sure she could spell her own name at that moment, let alone explain basic mechanics. He’s too close, too warm, too _much_ for her tiny lab and her solitary habits, and she doesn’t know how to deal with that because it’s not something she’s used to. Raven doesn’t get nervous, or flustered, or confused, especially not because some grounder dude has decided he wants to learn about technology. It’s _annoying_.

But she’s already agreed to this, and she owes it to Clarke to at least give it a shot. So she tries to ignore the way she can feel his presence at her back even with a respectable amount of space between them, and starts to explain. And ten minutes later, immersed in the subject that never lets her down, never fails to make her feel like anything is possible and that she can be more than the sum of her personal tragedies, Raven actually does forget to be annoyed and starts to enjoy having someone here to show off to.

* * *

Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s easy to get used to having him here. It’s not that he actively gets in her way – he’s a quick learner and good with his hands, so that they can move from the basics to actually building functioning stuff pretty quickly – or that he talks incessantly. It’s just that, when he does speak, his words have a tendency to hit her straight in the gut. Like the morning, a few days into their partnership, when he says:

“Your armour is strange. Surely it should cover more of you to be effective?“

Mentally still immersed in blueprints and circuit plans, Raven has trouble making sense of what the hell he’s talking about, until he actually (very disrespectfully!) taps her leg brace with his screw driver to indicate what he’s referring to.

Raven bats away his hand, enjoying a flash of triumph when the sharp tip of her soldering iron nicks his sleeve. “This isn’t _armour_. It’s a crutch.”

The familiar anger that she’s been trying so hard to keep a lid on threatens to slam back into her, already knocking around the edges of her consciousness and making her hip throb faintly. But then he shrugs and, with a few choice words in his grovelly voice, takes all the force out of it.

“It makes you stronger, doesn’t it? So it’s basically the same thing.”

“I thought armour was only supposed to protect you. You still have to be strong all on your own.”

“Ah, but knowing you’re protected _does_ make you stronger.”

Raven doesn’t know what to say to that, so she gets right back to soldering. She hasn’t managed to get anything personal out of him so she doesn’t know if he really is a warrior, but at this point she just assumes he knows more about armour than she does.

To her relief, he drops the subject, only speaking up again when he has a question about the part she’s given him to work with. She explains it and he listens, earnestly and carefully, and they spend the rest of the afternoon in surprisingly comfortable silence.  

Of course, the peace doesn’t last long. Because while he is admittedly a good student/assistant/whatever his position here is, Roan is also, in a subtle way, quite meddlesome. For one thing, he changes things around her lab. With every passing day it becomes less cluttered, which she would object to on principle because she needs her tools at hand at all times, but somehow, she still has – she just also has a lot more space to work with and the risk of stumbling over something that got pushed to the floor decreases dramatically.

So, alright, he does have his uses. (Even though, just to be clear, Raven did _not_ ask him to clean her lab). When she’s finished with a part, she can now send him to deliver it to wherever it needs to go instead of having to hobble around Arkadia on her own. It wasn’t so much the walking that was exhausting on those trips, it was the fact that she had to hold her head extra high when she met anyone’s eyes just so they knew there was no point in judging her. Yes, she had been the one who had first fallen for ALIEs false promises, but it’s not like she _forced_ them to follow her example. Still, why face people when she now has a very convenient, probably incredibly strong grounder assistant?

Not that she tells him any of this. But of course, he figures it out anyway, embarrassingly quickly. (Which might have something to do with the fact that he too is mostly cooped up with her, so who else is he supposed to watch and analyse? Because that, she realizes fairly quickly, is what he does: he watches people, takes in every little detail about them, and probably saves it in his brain somewhere to use later.)

“You don’t like interacting with your people very much, do you?”

“They don’t like _me_ much.”

“Why? You do a great service to this camp.”

“I also convinced them to follow a crazy guy and a murderous AI that almost killed them all.”

Roan lifts a questioning eyebrow, and for the first time since the whole ALIE episode, Raven actually feels the need to defend herself.

“In my defense, I also destroyed it and saved them all.”

“Then that should be all that matters.”

Raven shrugs. “Tell that to them.”

She’s not bitter about practically becoming an outcast – that was mostly her own doing anyway, and it’s not like she particularly misses the company. But something flashes in the grounder’s ice-and-steel eyes that makes her think that maybe she should be angry. Yes, she fell for ALIE’s lies, but maybe she wouldn’t have if anyone had given a fuck about her just a little earlier.

And for the first time in a long time, Raven remembers feeling like she’s _someone_ , someone important and worthy of love and attention and admiration.  

* * *

They don’t see a lot of other people, as they mostly stay in the lab during the days and Roan goes off to his quarters or to speak to Clarke in the evening.

He tries to drag her to lunch once, but it’s kind of a disaster (and yet, somehow, also the most fun Raven’s had in a while.) The second they enter the room, everyone falls completely silent. And when people’s conversations pick up again, Raven can tell something’s different: There are hushed whispers instead of animated conversation, and people keep turning their heads to look at them. Raven’s approach, as always, is to just square her shoulders and keep walking, but then someone  hisses something at her and in a flash, her grounder friend has pulled the man off his bench and slammed him to the floor.

Raven herself couldn’t even make out what the man was saying, so she’s kind of taken unawares by the sudden development (and also possibly distracted by the way throwing around a grown man made Roan’s biceps bulge), but the entire hall has – once again – gone quiet, so she figures it’s only a matter of time before someone calls the guards and Roan gets in trouble. And she can’t have that – he really _is_ a decent assistant by now, and it took her a lot of time and patience to get him there.

So she drags him straight back to her lab, and only when they’re safely inside does it occur to her to ask what the man said:

“He insulted you.”

“What did he say?”

She prepares for the worst and tells herself it can’t hurt her, but she’s not at all expecting his reply:

“He called you a “grounder-pounder”. I assume that was meant as an insult.”

Raven can’t help it, she laughs out loud. This is just too ridiculous. Here she is, the self-imposed social outcast with the leg brace and the incredibly messy workshop, having her honour defended by some grounder who thinks she’s too stupid to realize there’s something more behind his interest in mechanics.

“I’m sorry….,” she draws another wheezing breath. “It’s just that… he called me a grounder-pounder, so you _tackled_ him?”

“They should show you more respect.”

“Well, they won’t, so you better tell me now if you’re planning to do this a lot. Because if you are, I can’t let you out of here again. There are still quite a few of Pike’s supporters left, and they’re probably just waiting for an excuse to off you and make it look like an accident.”

“Let them try,” he growls, and Raven feels the tail end of her laughter get stuck in her throat as she recalls that moment in the dining hall just now: his quick, precise movements, the tightly contained force of his anger, and realizes for the first time just how dangerous he is. Who the hell is this guy Clarke has dumped on her in the name of diplomacy?

But then he continues to speak, and her momentary fear turns into something else.

“They won’t be able to drive me off. And they sure as hell won’t disrespect you.”

It’s stupid, Raven knows, but his words send a thrill through her that she hasn’t felt in a while. As far as she can recall, no one has ever offered to _defend_ her, and even though she’s very capable of defending herself, it’s… nice.

(Alright, so maybe _nice_ isn’t the most accurate word for it, but it’s the only one she will allow herself. He’ll be leaving again at some point. Best not to get too used to him.)

* * *

Unfortunately, it soon turns out that Roan’s apparent readiness to protect Raven doesn’t end with her fellow Arkadians: He also has a tendency to spot when she’s hurting herself, which, if she’s honest, happens a lot more frequently than attacks from other people, and causes much bigger damage.

She doesn’t hate her body enough to try and leave it behind for an artificial world again, but she’s still not on very good terms with it. Sleep, food, exercise – all those things have become negligible, irritating more often than not when they pull her out of her quick, agile, useful mind and into bleak corporeal reality. And since she doesn’t rely on her body in order to sit at a table, she doesn’t consider it very important to nurture it.

Roan, apparently, disagrees.

It starts with the food: From one day to the next, a bowl of snacks appears on the table, so close she only needs to reach out and grab an apple or a handful of nuts. It’s a change she can live with because it makes her more efficient.

The same goes for her sleeping habits: More often than not, Roan insists they call it a day much earlier than she would if she were alone, and once again, she’s irritated on principle but she knows, deep down, that he’s right. And when she returns to work after a full night’s sleep, she can practically feel her mind working faster, so again, that’s not something she can complain about.

It’s still unnerving, though, that kind of attention. When was the last time anyone cared about her getting enough sleep? No one gets enough sleep these days.

Roan cares, apparently, and not just about the amount of sleep she gets.

One morning she oversleeps and is just struggling to get up from her low cot when he enters and sees her. This already vexes Raven, because she probably looks anything but dignified as she flails to get her unwieldy body up from the almost floor-level cot.

Apparently, her indignation matches his, as she sees his blue eyes flash dangerously before he crosses the space from the door to her corner with a few long strides. He comes to a halt right before her and, without much fanfare, holds out his hand. The fact that he doesn’t just grab her and pull her to her feet but offers his help without being pushy about it is something she’ll have to think about, but before she can get around to that, he growls:

“They shouldn’t make you sleep here. It’s barbaric. You’re a person, not just a worker.”

Is that how he sees her? Like she’s beeing held here as some kind of indentured labourer, forced to slave away at her work bench night and day?

“They don’t _make_ me sleep here. I have my own quarters, but I prefer sleeping here. That way, if I have an idea for how to solve a problem, I can just get up and do it.”

She ignores his outstretched hand, too aware of the pity that’s attached to it, and continues to struggle. He doesn’t pull away.

“But you work every day. I know life on earth is harsh, but even my people are granted a day free of work to rest and enjoy themselves.”

“We get a free day too. But what am I supposed to do with mine, go for a walk?”

She can hear the bitterness in her voice now and hates it, but she’s trapped in a sort of half-crouch that makes her leg feel like it’s exploding, and it’s this that makes her finally take hold of his still outstretched hand.

She intends to just use his hand as a handle to hold on to, but the second her fingers close around his rough palm, he pulls her up altogether and sets her on her feet, his other hand hovering by her waist to catch her if she sways. She catches herself with her hands on his chest just in case, and she gets distracted by the feel of it under her palms, hard and unyielding. Unlike her own, his breathing is calm and regular, but his eyes are still narrowed angrily.

“So they’re not the ones mistreating you. You’re doing that all on your own.”

“I’m not _mistreating_ myself. I’m perfectly fine like this.”

“If one of my warr… my friends lived like this, I would tell them to get their act together. Not eating or sleeping enough when you easily could is not strong, it is childish. We are not at war anymore. We can afford to take care of ourselves.”

She doesn’t know what to reply because somehow, this fact never really got through to her. Raven hasn’t been at war with anyone but her own body in a long time, and has learned the hard way that there’s no way to win here.

* * *

She only learns he’s a king after several weeks, and honestly, it kind of blows her away. It’s not that she’s starstruck at the idea of being in the presence of what the grounders consider royalty ( _as if!_ ), but from the moment she sees the group of Azgeda traders bow respectfully and eagerly tell him what good deals they made for their people, one little thought worms itself inside her head and gets louder and louder every second: He’s the first leader who truly treated her well. Who saw her as a person, not a resource. Who _saw_ her, full stop.

Because the Ark may not have had a king, but they sure loved their hierarchies, and for most of her life, Raven was on the bottom rung of that hierarchy. It was only her brain and sheer determination that got her some respect and marginally larger quarters, but she hadn’t so much as talked to anyone from Go Sci before Abby Griffin needed help finding her daughter. And the pattern has only continued after that: Clarke, Abby, Jaha… the Griffin women at least may genuinely consider themselves her friends, but their friendship tends to come with conditions attached.

Roan… he never held back about the fact that he’s here for his people, but he started acting like a friend long before she’d ever called him that even in her head.

They walk back to her workshop in silence, and Raven tries not to be the first to address the elephant in the room, she _really_ tries, but in the end, her curiosity wins out.

“So it’s _King_ Roan then, huh?”

He looks up from where he’s currently sorting screws by size in a clear attempt to look like he’s busy. “You really didn’t know?”

Meeting his inquiring gaze, she asks bluntly: “Should I have?”

She does get a little nervous then, because while he’s probably not allowed to kill anyone from Skaikru, being their guest and all, she suddenly remembers all the less-than-flattering things she said to him over the past weeks. Raven’s teaching style may be effective, but gentle it is not.

But Roan only looks at her for a few silent moments before he actually smiles, one of those rare, secretive smiles of his which she’s only seen about a handful of times in all their weeks together and which somehow makes her heart skip a beat.

“No, you shouldn’t.”

And that’s that, or at least it should be because usually, their conversations are short and to the point. But somehow, today, that’s not good enough for Raven.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought Clarke had told you beforehand. Your task is an important one, I hope you understand that. Azgeda profiting from your and ALIEs technology is one of the key conditions of our alliance. True, I didn’t tell Clarke that I’d be overseeing the technology exchange _personally_ , but I figured she’d found a way to inform you. And by the time I started to suspect you genuinely didn’t know, it seemed stupid to just blurt it out.”

“So you’re not a “shout it from the rooftops” kind of king.”

He smiles wryly. “No. I’ve only held the title for a few months, and my mother had to die for me to inherit it. Not exactly a good time to brag about being King.”

Oddly enough, the fact that Roan is a freaking _king_ doesn’t actually change anything between them. She still gets impatient when he takes too long with a task. He still won’t let her get away with anything and least of all with lying to herself. And she still feels a hell of a lot more human when she’s with him than with most other people.

And when he is called back to his people to settle some kind of dispute, Raven actually realizes that she’s sad to see him go.  

* * *

Raven’s not a particularly big fan of the whole “absence makes the heart grow fonder”-thing – she’s spent too much time waiting for Finn only to find that he had moved on when she finally made it to earth.

So she tries not to dwell on the fact that her constant companion of the last weeks is suddenly gone. But much like the pain, her loneliness only gets more pronounced after it’s been absent for a while.

And so, when he comes back a few weeks later and wordlessly sits down on the empty stool that will forever be his in her mind, Raven feels a sense of completeness that makes her carefully put down the tangle of wires she’s been trying to untangle, limp over to his seat, and kiss him.

She’s gentle at first, so hesitant she could almost be described as scared if Raven didn’t refuse to be scared on principle. But in this moment, as he waits for her to deepen the kiss and she waits for her body to betray her again, for some kind of pain to set in because when has there ever not been pain lately, Raven is scared. Because this, she realizes – this is something she wants. Needs, perhaps.

And then for once earth is kind to her: Roan slides his arms up her sides and pulls her onto his lap, mindful of her leg, and she threads her arms around his neck and opens her mouth under his and lets joy and delight and pleasure wash over her, purer and stronger than even ALIEs chip could produce them.

True to the promise Raven made to him before he left, she’s been sleeping in her quarters for a while now, her old cot sitting unused in the corner of the workshop. There’s a layer of dust on the blanket, but they ignore it as Roan lowers her on it, carefully without making her feel fragile and broken, and helps her fumble off her brace and clothes.

He’s as thorough and gentle as she knew he would be from watching his hands work every day, nimble and patient, and soon she’s coming apart with his name on her breath and not so much as a twinge of pain in her body.

It’s only much, much later that day that she remembers what she wanted to ask him the moment he appeared in her – their – workshop.

“Why did you come back?”

“I wanted to make sure everything I need finds its way to Azgeda.”

“Your tech is almost ready, we would have sent it off in a week or so. Suitably protected, of course.”

“Well, the machinery is not the only thing I came for.”

Raven raises a questioning eyebrow instead of asking what he means.

“My advisers tell me I need a queen.”

It takes embarrassingly long for the words to sink in, which Raven decides to blame on the fact that he’s currently drawing very distracting patterns on her back with his calloused fingertips.

“Seriously dude? We literally just had sex for the first time, and you’re already proposing?” Raven shoots him a cocky grin. “Pathetic.”

She intends to tease him a lot more about this, but he kisses her again and rolls over her, and there’s nothing pathetic about the look he gives her: pure fiery hunger that makes her breath stutter.

“We’ll talk about this in the morning. I’m not here as a king.”

And, well, Raven’s not going to protest when he’s already kissing a trail down her neck and rocking against her and all-around making her agree that talking is overrated. She can always figure out if she wants to be a queen later.

 


End file.
